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Iran Politician Criticizes U.S. Ballot Access Laws

The May 25 New York Times carries a story about Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered the front-runner in the Iran presidential election next month. Rafsanjani is quoted as saying, “There is only a veneer of democracy in the United States. Election laws are so complicated that people have no choice but to vote for one of the candidates who are with one of the two parties.”

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Iran Politician Criticizes U.S. Ballot Access Laws — 9 Comments

What delicious irony!
Nearly 1,600 Americans have died in Iraq allegedly, in the latest batch of excuses as to why we’re there, “for democracy.”
And it takes an Iranian politician to point up the hypocrisy of the two old parties in claiming to seek “democracy” for Iraq while denying it to the people of the United States.
We were taught the dictatorships, such as Soviet Russia, Red China, Communist Cuba and Communist North Korea, were bad because they had one-party rule.
Are we, say, half as bad because we have two-party rule?

It is a sad day in our country’s history when it takes a foreign politician to point out that people in the United States have little or in some cases no political freedom. Our government under the Bush Regime continues to talk about how free we are when in fact, our great-grandparents had 10 times the political freedom that we today in America now have. 100 years ago, ballot access burocracies didn’t exist and anyone who wanted to run for office could do so just by signing up. Apathy torward the two party system is greater now than it has ever been. Don’t the politicians in Washington D.C. and in the state capitals know that they are setting themselves up for a mass uprising as soon as the American people figure out that the politicians of the two major parties are the cause of the political dissatisfaction. Don’t the powerbrokers of the two-party status quo know that when the people of the poor, working, and middle socioeconomic classes figure out that they are being directly hoodwinked into voting for only two and sometimes only one candidate, the downtroddin are going to rebell viciously. The Democratic and Republican Parties are hurting themselves in the long-run by maintaining burocracies that limit the competition.

NObody claims Iran is a better place. But, change the names below from “Iranian conservatives” to republicans and democrats,and suddenly Iran is three times better than the USA????

I think not. But, the USA does NOT have anything approaching free elections. Better than North Korea or Cuba, perhaps. But hardly free and open.
Obviously why “US officials” declined to comment.
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“It’s clear they [Iranian conservatives] are not going to permit any presidential candidate of whom they don’t approve,” said Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations. The political dialogue in Iran, he added, “is between conservatives and ultraconservatives.”